The Conspiracy of the Ravens: War of the Ravens, #1

By Nelson McKeeby

His brain destroyed by epilepsy and his body wracked with Stevens-Johnson syndrome, an author sits down to pen his last book.

 

It's a tale of Rains-a-Lot, the warrior who ate Thomas Custer's heart; Ivy d' Seille, a child soldier and veteran of the French Resistance; Dr. Kelle Brainerd, holder of three Ph.D.s in Reality Physics; and a purple 1957 Chevy concealing the spirit of a New Orleans Macumba from the 19th century as they run into a wizard, a shadowy Company, and a whole bunch of ravens.

 

But no story is just a story, and our author isn't just an author.

 

The reviewers are raving about the War of the Ravens series.

"…ten pounds of crazy in a five pound sack." — A famous musician who refused to give her name.

"…everything that is wrong with the 420 movement." —an anonymous Iowan politician.

"You will never publish this crap in a million years…"— A writing professor in New England.

• Language: English
• Publisher: 4 Horsemen Publications
• Release date: Dec 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9798823202343

Book preview

The Boy Who Ate

Thomas Custer’s Heart

Date: July 26, 1876

Location: Fresh Wells, Indian Territory

Blue Flower gazed down at the youth. He was maybe fifteen, dirty, malnourished with whipcord muscles, and a fading bruise on his face. The boy was a vision of the grasslands washed up on Blue Flower’s doorstep as if a stick carried on a rain-swelled stream, damaged by the currents that had forced him forward and back, but not yet destroyed, and stamped with the defiance of his people. On the dusty horizon, the Quakers who had left him were rapidly disappearing into the stormy, r ed sunset.

Marlow! She yelled for her husband.

Marlow Smith had shed his tribal name and worked as a bookkeeper for the agency. His coworkers said if only the naphtha soap would wash his skin just a little better, he would be as good as white. He dealt with the insult because they were not starving, nor were the blue soldiers gunning them down as they were to the North in revenge for the murder of the Morning Star. Some of her neighbors mourned this blond warrior, but not Blue Flower. She remembered the government soldiers in a way her husband never could with his education and letters. She remembered the knives they carried on the ends of their muskets, the blankness in their eyes as they killed women and children for doing nothing more than existing. Marlow could never comprehend the hell she wished to send the white soldiers to.

Marlow came out and paused as he took in the sight of the boy and the rapidly retreating Quakers. He was dressed in a casual work suit consisting of an engineer’s coat, pleated trousers, a white shirt with a stiff collar attached, and a pair of small glasses pushed up on his head. Did they not want to have tea?

No, they just dropped off this. Her nod at the boy was curt at best.

Marlow focused on the man-child, a creature with a hunted, foxlike demeanor and a visage sketched on his face that could kill worlds. Despite the hate in his eyes, the child started crying under the intense gaze of the couple. It was also obvious he was not Cherokee.

He is not of the band! Marlow exclaimed. Whites claimed that Indians looked alike, but it was not true. Tribes differed in how they carried themselves. A Lakota had a wide gait and swung his arms farther out when he walked. A Cherokee was more parsimonious in his movements and gestures. A Hopi would sometimes conceal their hands and arms under their clothing, while eastern bands never put their hands in their pockets unless they lived close by a white community. Blue Flower could see her husband assess the child. This was a youth of the grasslands whose mind was a mobile canvas that would refuse any paint that could narrow down his world. Marlow must be thinking that there was very little labor to be had from a child of the grasslands. He would eat their food, run wild in the town, and bring ruin on them unless they could tame his wild impulses and help him survive in the white world. Marlow continued to talk after a long lapse. Why would they bring a Lakota to us?

Blue Flower replied, We look the same to the whites, do we not?

Marlow frowned at her. He had business with the Quakers, relied on them to ease business with the blue coats. He was unhappy she did not like them. She knew enough of his feelings now that even a slight change in his tone communicated what others might need days to understand. Blue Flower was not a lover of the spoken word. She lived in a world of modulated silences where the creak of a board meant her husband was uneasy over some question of profits, where the sound of the watermill slowing up could indicate that the water tank would not fill that night, and the laughter of children would indicate her own mind wandering to the three shrines that sat behind the house, each one a memory of a bright smile and a warm hug.

Do you speak the language? Marlow asked in Cherokee. The youth continued to cry, showing no signs of understanding. English? he asked, and the child nodded.

We will call you a-tlo-yi-hv a-yo-li; it means crybaby. At least until you learn to speak up for yourself.

The youth nodded, tears dripping dirty water down his face. Blue Flower would think the Quakers might have bathed him or dressed him in better clothing before throwing the foundling onto their stoop. Marlow thought the Quakers were saints because they would loan Indians money at just twice what they loaned whites.

She stepped in front of her husband’s dilatory questioning. So, did they let you keep anything? She hoped he would have some money to purchase respectable clothing. Missionaries were strange that way. They would watch silently as soldiers robbed you blind, killed your children, and burned your homes, but would then gather money and food for the person they had just seen ruined.

From deep in the folds of his ragged garments, the youth pulled a large, shiny silver revolver of the newest make. Blue Flower grabbed her husband and drew him back as he let out a convulsive oath. Give that damn thing to me! he yelled.

The youth seemed to grow two feet in stature even as tears continued to fall from his eyes. I took this from the brother of the Morning Star after counting coup on him in battle. I will die before I will let you or anyone else take it from me.

Blue Flower stepped in front of her husband. Fool boy, keep the gun, but never show it to anyone. They are killing Indians who even talk like that.

The youth seemed to deflate. I am a man! I counted coup in battle.

Blue Flower reached out and slapped the youth. And now you are a child again. Learn to keep your mouth shut and your eyes open, and you may live to the next winter. Otherwise, I will have to bury you with the rest of my sons, and the sky knows I do not want another grave.

The youth hid the gun back in his rags and said nothing else. Behind him, Blue Flower noted a storm brewing up and hoped it was not an omen about the child’s life.

Incident at Bashful

Date: August 7, 1960

Location: Bashful, Kansas

The purple 1957 Chevy blasted across the sunbaked Kansas landscape, sometimes hitting 120 km/h on straights. Despite the reputation she had earned for reluctant obedience in the motor pool, today she was on her best behavior, hugging the road like a race car and paying close attention to each rise and fall of the pavement. Her engine purred with the low-throttled roar of restrained power, wheel ready and responsive like the stick of the most modern Delta Dart fighter.

Ivy was in a mood. Maybe it was the stupid mission of picking up some girl in a tiny Kansas town and driving her to an even tinier Wyoming town. Maybe it was the haunting dreams of Indochina that twisted his brain most nights. He could almost taste the smell of rotting plants and hear the blistering, mind-numbing heat that cracked the skin and drove men away from their intellects. That terrible land had finally broken his mind and left him … nothing, except to contemplate the car he was driving and the town he was driving to.

The Company had gone all out on the balky Chevy. It had power steering, power brakes, a V8 with fuel injectors, three-point harness belts, safety glass, an air conditioner, and a heater with three extra coils for Arctic weather. The radio was not only equipped with a powerful A.M. receiver but also had a crystal to listen in on local police chatter between radio-equipped patrol cars and their dispatchers. In Bashful, the dispatcher was a soft contralto named Betty-Jean Weyerhaeuser who called the town’s three officers, Bud, Ted, and Charlie, by their first names. To make the driving experience more relaxing, it had a Turboglide automatic transmission, and installed on the passenger-side dash was a highly disturbing electric clock.

Perhaps the most amazing thing attached to the Chevy was that damned clock. As far as Ivy could tell, it dropped less than a second a day. He had given up setting it to his Rolex Oyster Perpetual (with a face that read 50 m = 165 feet so science-ignorant Americans could time athletic events) and started to set the Rolex to the car. The clock brought a preternatural precision to the Chevy that should not exist in a hunk of metal. Approximate left the realm of reality and retreated into the darkness of the night given the accuracy of the clock. With the Chevy, time was so accurate that the universe had to set its clocks to it.

Contemplating the radio made Ivy think also of the car’s unusual trunk. In the capacious trunk of the Chevy, the Company had provided two portable Snap On transit cases for the things agents carried to help them stay alive. Leave the car and take the cases was the rule when things got tight.

The cases were large and looked as if they might not fit in the trunk, but when they were inside, there was still room for Ivy and Rains-a-Lot to throw in their own steamer trunks, a couple of duffle bags, a spare tire, a rain tarp and a canvas tent, a box of spare parts, a tool kit, and several cases of army rations. When they had first been given the car last year, they had stacked all their desired dunnage next to it. The stack had towered above the car, but somehow it had all fit in the truck with room for a little more.

The trunk and the clock were not all that was wrongfully right about the vehicle the Company had given them. In some ways, there was no give in the purple Chevy. When dirt had covered its sides or its tires grew caked in mud, she would be hard to start, would hesitate in acceleration, get squishy in braking, would idle like a pig, and would complain about the smallest use of power with a flurry of pings and sighs. Ivy had thus learned to keep the purple Chevy spotless. He would wash the car with a shammy and soft soap, buff the windows until they were invisible, carefully degrease and buff the engine compartment and replace any hoses that looked even a little suspect.

The Chevy had fuel injection, like fighter jets have, so most mechanics would not touch her. Instead, Ivy had taken to a constant round of inspections and cleanings of the entire engine. Deep in some corner of his mind, he felt a purple satisfaction from his efforts, and that made him even happier when the Chevy sparkled. After a few hours washing the car, buffing the seats, shampooing the carpets, and giving the engine some care, she would drive like a dream. Causality was challenged in the charging metal beast.

When the car drove well like today, it was a good thing, because the Midwest was an endless canvas of sameness repeated to a horizon that came too quickly and dwarfed any structure that man in his hubris tried to make. Big-sky-country they called it. Ivy thought it was more like long-road-country with miles and miles for miles and miles and nothing else to ease the severity of the landscape or to soften the imagination. Kansas alone, one damn state in the endless middle of America, was one-third of France in area. And almost no one lived here.

Tornadoes had passed through this area just a month ago, leaving their signs in unexpected places. Unseasonable damn things that wandered across the landscape as if controlled by some maniacal intellect. It was the barns that scarred Ivy in his soul. Every couple of kilometers there was a destroyed barn with its roof sitting intact adjacent. Nature, in its terrible majesty, had somehow directed the tornadoes with a horrible precision that preserved the roof of a structure but destroyed everything the roof concealed. It was like a bad joke. Some farmer coming out of his basement would see the death of all he owned, but at least he had all the slate shingles he needed in case he wanted to rebuild.

Rains-a-Lot sat next to Ivy in quiet, stern confidence. Ivy’s partner did not appreciate all the details of technology or worry about oddities of weather. He treated the Chevy, with all its quirks, like a fine horse. He had never known the stern man to use a telephone, send a telegraph, or turn on a television set. Gizmos did not seem to matter to him much. Ivy doubted Rains-a-Lot processed the differences between the new Chevy and the old Packard they had been assigned in any qualitative sense. To him, the car was like a steed that, sadly, he had never learned to control but could still ride in.

The car took air over a frost heave, and for a second, there was that feeling of emptiness as they traced an ogive through space, until they landed with a thud and the rear tires caught the pavement with a rubbery growl. Rains-a-Lot continued to look forward, but his ears moved a little, a sign of tension. Although Rains-a-Lot did not drive, he did not approve of Ivy’s driving much of the time either. Ivy knew he let silly things bother him, and through some Gallic genetic trait, those irritations were transmitted to his feet and legs through muscle memory. When Ivy drove calmly, the Indian would roll down his window and put his head on a swivel, looking at each extraneous detail that passed them, as if the red-painted mailboxes or square bale hay could suddenly pose an existential threat to a car rocketing down the street. When Ivy was disturbed, he drove faster and more erratically, causing Rains-a-Lot to fix his head forward and grasp at the base of his seat, as if he were worried the forces of acceleration might tear him apart. This in turn made Ivy more upset with the world, and he would actually find himself driving worse to see if the Indian would react.

The Kansas day was hot, La-Rue-Sans-Joie hot, although without the sickeningly sweet smell of decay or the humidity that would kill a man who was unprepared to tend the basic mechanics of living. Ivy blasted the Chevy over a bridge, nearly taking it airborne again, using the car as some turgid expression of his mental ill-ease. Rains-a-Lot made a huffing sound as the vehicle skidded slightly on its big, black, all-weather tires and turned his gaze to Ivy. He could feel his partner’s stare saying, That was too much even for you. It was a rebuke of unprofessional behavior that Rains-a-Lot would provide him only on the rarest occasion. Ivy glanced at his passenger and purposely crinkled his eyebrows in reply to the Indian’s stare. Rains-a-Lot called Ivy’s emotional driving méthode française, as if it was something Ivy could change. Of course, knowing the Cherokee’s exact feelings on any subject was an issue of delicacy. Calling the Indian taciturn did not begin to explain his ability to avoid the use of any language for weeks at a time. Still, after two years Ivy had learned that Rains-a-Lot talked with a language of stillness that was rich in its ability to communicate to those who listened. Right now, his face tightened at the cheeks, which might have been meant to say, Just do your job and leave the bullshit back in the hotel room with the bottles of gin.

Rains-a-Lot was not that angry with Ivy, but he was concerned. What made him concerned was the mission, and Ivy’s mood, the dry, hot air of the dusty plains, and that feeling like there were words to be said, although none ever came. It was the feedback loop that Ivy felt them in, Rains-a-Lot’s anxiety fed Ivy’s disquiet, which fed back into the Indian’s mood and sent the Chevy speeding nearly 120 km/h down the road to a tiny town. Shake it off and think on something else, Ivy thought. But it was possible for him to not imagine they were the villains in some cheap and sordid spy novel written by a college student in need of something to turn in for their English class. Ivy had done too much in his life to ever think of himself as a white hat. Besides, he had a scar on his face and would never lose the edges of his French accent, so he often felt tailor-made for the role of villain.

He went into a reverie.

Ivy had met the James Bond author Ian Fleming in the war before he was anything more than a reckless teenage minder for the French resistance. The older man was somewhat of a pig to the younger Ivy.

As a youth, Ivy was proud and traumatized from four years of fighting. The death of so many people he cared for had marked him. He had become easily hurt by uncaring adults. Fleming was just the sort of uncaring nonce that a child-like Ivy could teethe at, all British and self-centered in the maelstrom of war.

Years later, he had read Fleming’s novel Dr. No while recovering from battle injuries in Saigon, and he thought of how much of a scam the spook’s books were. Anyone who read the thing would not actually know Bond was Fleming, just some fantasy version of him wrapped in a thrilling alter ego.

Ivy knew the real Fleming though. He remembered the man’s goddamned bouncy jeep speeding across the countryside risking his life and those with him. Ivy, as a member of the resistance, would have preferred to remain unseen, to blend in with the world, to avoid eyes that might tell tales to fascist killers. Fleming though was to Ivy the textbook definition of a goddamned amateur.

Despite the contempt he felt for the man, some of his ways had rubbed off on Ivy. He had learned to drink the gin Fleming had pushed onto him, and Fleming’s fatalistic way of seeing the world in black and white had become part of Ivy’s worldview. Ivy never thought of it as a good exchange of values and wondered if everyone learned the wrong things from their patrons.

A turn in the road came up, suddenly jerking Ivy from his thoughts; he had to overcorrect to avoid bouncing into a ditch. Sometimes he lived more in the past than the now, his brain a broken instrument that was always split in time. There was mental scar tissue that seemed to prevent him from ever being a whole person.

Ivy glanced again at his partner. He was older than Ivy by about ten years, a nearly silent stoic who was scrutable and known to him, if to few other people. He wore his heart on his sleeve, exposed to the cruelties of the world, but he was a person of such strength that he had long ago found ways of hiding this weakness. It was not a weakness at all in Ivy’s mind that Rains-a-Lot cared deeply. His chagrin at Ivy’s emotional state was just that, caring. As the Kansas landscape whipped